


Realign

by Steals_Thyme (Liodain)



Category: Watchmen - All Media Types
Genre: Community: seasonofkink, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Massage, POV Second Person, Sensation Play, Sexual Repression, UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-18
Updated: 2015-09-18
Packaged: 2018-04-21 10:05:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4824755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liodain/pseuds/Steals_Thyme
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You are determined to not enjoy this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Realign

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [Season of Kink](http://seasonofkink.dreamwidth.org/) 2015, Sensation Play square.

You know that it's going to happen a split-second before it does—fast enough that there's nothing you can do about it, but enough time to watch it play out as though in slow-motion. A slab on the brink of the building, unanchored, tipping under Nite Owl's foot. You tamp your horror, fling yourself belly-down at the edge of the building and force yourself to look at the street below.

Mortar powders under your hands, chunks of masonry loose and rocking under your grip.

"Hey," Nite Owl says, from a couple of inches beneath you. "Could you...?" He sounds breathless and airy, fear pushed aside in favor of inappropriate casualness. His gauntlets have a death-grip on a concrete abutment that's spattered with bird-leavings and downy feathers; his face is turned upward, goggles reflecting the anemic dawn. You can't see where he's put his feet, if he's put them anywhere at all. 

You extend your arms wordlessly—there will be time later to take your fear out on him—and you grunt as Nite Owl takes a hold. He is a solidly-built man, and his costume is heavy; you have to work to heave him up. Something wrenches in your shoulder, bright darts of pain singing through your back and arm and chest. You focus on that, instead of the relief you feels as your partner crawls onto the rooftop and rolls onto his back.

"Be more careful," you say faintly, but Nite Owl doesn't hear your admonishment. He is too busy laughing up at the pale sky.

*

The pain the next day is unconscionable. As Kovacs, you ruin three négligées in succession, muscles in your arm spasming in torment as you try to feed the fabric through your sewing machine. Your boss docks your pay and sends you out back to tag stock and fold it into boxes instead. You don't care, except for the way your shoulder twinges every time you lift your arm above waist level.

Later, you try to sleep in the scant few hours before patrol. Your body aches insistently, keeping you awake, and when you do drift off your subconscious repeatedly offers you a gruesome tableau of a body spread across the sidewalk, burst open like overripe fruit. You give up, despair setting in at being able to hide your tiredness as well as your injury.

*

Daniel, of course, notices immediately on handing you a mug of coffee. It's still a half-hour until you usually meet, but your restlessness brought you here early. Perhaps you should have spent the time warming up instead, forcing flexibility into your shoulders through sheer determination.

"Your arm okay?" Daniel asks, resting back against the kitchen counter. He's in sweats and a t-shirt, a tenuous civilian guise with the heavy muscle of his folded arms and the sharp gleam in his eye. Amiable, passive Dreiberg with Nite Owl bleeding through. Dangerous.

"Fine," you tell him, and then fail spectacularly to lift the coffee to your mouth. Any attempts to surreptitiously wipe the droplets spilled on your cuff would be pointless. You console yourself with the fact that you didn't make an entirely pathetic sound.

Daniel pushes away from the countertop, slides a chair out from under the table. "Must have yanked it pretty badly pulling me up last night, huh," he says. He gestures at the chair. "Sit."

"No," you say again, "I'm fine." 

Daniel shakes his head, and you can tell he has no intention of letting up. Sometimes he forgets that you are supposed to be the stubborn one. "How's your range of motion?" 

"Let's go," you say, "and you can see for yourself." It is nothing but bullheadedness—you know this, that it will end in something only just short of humiliation—but Daniel's ministrations always rub you the wrong way. You resents how foolish it makes you, sometimes.

*

You favor your right hand, and your performance suffers for it. Not long into the patrol you intervene at a 7-11, clerk being menaced by a gang. One of them lands a solid hook to your jaw when you don't get your guard up fast enough. You can taste blood in the back of your mouth. Kid will be hero of the hour, no doubt.

Nite Owl turns frenetic, working hard to keep their opponents' attention on him and away from you, weaving them around the store's aisles and then out into the street. Finally he has them zip-tied and half-conscious on the sidewalk, slumped in a row against the store's glass front; inside, the clerk pushes goods back onto the shelves with a deep weariness.

Your shoulder is screaming blue murder and your jaw is throbbing. You prepare yourself for a bout of insufferable attentiveness.

"We're going back to the Nest," Nite Owl says, bent over with hands resting on his thighs, catching his breath. "I can't pick up your slack all night."

You take umbrage at Nite Owl's tone, at the insinuation that you are a liability. "Could take these reprobates out with one hand tied behind my back," you tell him. It's a ludicrous statement after the night you've had so far, yet you can barely keep the indignation out of your voice. Then your shoulder cramps tight and you grunt in frustration.

"Well, that's obviously bullshit." Nite Owl straightens up, folds his arms. His irritation has dissipated, displaced by sympathy. You would prefer his temper. "Come on, man. It hurts just to look at you."

*

Daniel has managed to talk you out of your trench coat and suit jacket, and you even allowed him to tug the scarf from around your neck. You firmly draw the line at your shirt, despite his insistence that he can't do this properly unless you are practically indecent. You're perched on a stool brought up from the basement, and corralled between Daniel and the table.

"Here?" Daniel presses his thumb alongside your spine. 

You say nothing. Your elbows slide on the kitchen table under the pressure Daniel is exerting on your back, so you brace with your forearms. Daniel drags his thumb up toward the nape of your neck, pulling the shirtcloth with it.

You bow under his touch, breath running out of you as your muscles shudder and twinge.

Daniel flattens his palm over your shoulder blade and gently pushes you the rest of the way to the tabletop. It's cool through the material of your mask. You refuse to take pleasure in it. "Just put your head down," Daniel suggests. "Relax. Or, uh. Try to."

The only reason you are doing this is to get Daniel off your back, so to speak. You are doubtful that any amount of kneading and pawing will alleviate the pain—it will correct in time, of its own accord. Until then is just another injury to endure. You rest against the table, and let Daniel appease himself.

His hands feel large on your back, smoothing over your shoulder blades in slow, firm arcs. You are reminded of the way he tends to the Archimedes, bringing the hull to a luster with rigorous care. They move over you again and again, deliberate and rhythmic and almost hypnotic in a way that leaves you flat against the kitchen table.

Daniel's hands still for a moment. "Tell me if it gets too much."

You had too much before he even started, but before you can say so, Daniel's fingers probe at the edge of your scapula. You fight the urge to push up off the table with the sensation—it doesn't hurt, but falls substantially short of pleasure. It's intense and penetrating, and you want it to either stop, or tip over the threshold into true pain. 

"God, you're tight," Daniel says, fingers working and pushing, warm and insistent through the shirt fabric, still not quite hard enough. "How can you bear it?"

You don't know what he means, exactly—your body is as you've trained it to be, alert and responsive to your needs, a finely-balanced weapon always half-unsheathed—but you can feel the muscles begin loosen up, unhinging your bones. You do not think of other circumstances where Daniel might say something like that, with his hands where they are. You make a vague shrugging motion; it's difficult, sluggish like you're mired in quicksand. You feels Daniel's hands shift with it. 

Daniel seems to find something about that funny; a low laugh rumbles out of him as he leans onto you, his weight bearing onto the points of his fingers, into the meat of your back. Better, the way it feels like he's pressing into you, breaching your flesh and grinding against your muscles. Your breath is forced out of you in short, hard bursts, in time with his movements.

His hands work downwards; heavy pulses of pressure, working you into a different configuration. Your instinct is to tense up and fend it off, but your body is not resilient in the face of such manipulation. Untethered from its usual form, you spread out on the table like a pinned butterfly

Daniel skims your hips, palms on bare skin where your shirt has pulled free from your waistband. On their return, they pass under the fabric, pushing it up and up and you exhale sharply at Daniel's broad hands on your exposed body, touching you with such authority.

It is too practical to feel sordid, no worse than when Daniel patches you up after a bad night. He takes his hands away nonetheless, says, "I could do a better job, if you let me...?"

You grunt; not acquiescence but not refusal either. Perhaps to Daniel you are a circuit-board, paths etched in defective loops. He can fix those, deft with soldering iron and wire, rerouting faulty circuits into something more elegant. More efficient. You are glad that he doesn't know how often you short out.

You hear Daniel move over to the countertop, the snap of a bottle top and the slick sound of his hands rubbing together. The scent of warmed olive oil fills your nose. You feel your stomach growl and you shift in the stool, hoping the creak of its frame will cover the sound. Your dignity will not abide Daniel plying you with food, on top of this.

Daniel doesn't notice. "Sorry I don't have anything more professional," he says, as though you would prefer to smell like a massage parlor. He pushes your shirt up around your neck, then over your head, leaves it peeled halfway along your arms like a straitjacket.

The exposure wasn't unanticipated. The way you feel about it is. You are conscious of your bony frame, the prominence of your spine, and you can sense the moment Daniel sees your older scars. You hear his puff of displeasure and can imagine the stern purse of his lips. There is the light brush of his fingertips over a badly-healed stab wound, collected in your first month as a vigilante, livid and gnarling above your right kidney. Then, on a faded but unmistakable cigarette burn on your shoulder, from—

Daniel does not linger, thankfully, just spreads the oil over your back instead, works the lubricious stuff into the muscle there with pinching, rolling motions, pulling the skin away and pressing it down with something verging on brutality. You grimace into the polished wood of the table, and endure it with gratitude. Rather this tenderizing than the gentler strokes he started with. 

"I thought," Daniel says, and he sounds amused as he works his way up your back, pushes the heel of his hand between your shoulders with a precision that would make a lesser man groan. "I thought I'd have to rub a few knots out of you. But you're nothing _but_ knots. I'm kinda worried it's what holds you together."

You are also concerned that this might be the case. You feel like you're turned to liquid, not sure if you could stand up if you had to. Of all the ways Daniel could get under your skin, this is not the one you anticipated.

You feel almost relieved, in a way. Then Daniel wraps his hands either side of your neck and presses his thumbs against the back of your skull, under the mask. It makes your thighs tense and your fists curl, and when Daniel's fingers draw down again, hook under the ledge of your shoulder blade and something finally pulls back into place, you can't help the shudder of your breath or the way your hips want to push up and up, the only part of you that isn't lax.

Daniel is leaning over you. His hair tickles the nape of your neck. His breath is hot along your spine and his hands have slid around to your ribcage, fingers slotted against your bones. Your thighs have spread wide, knees pressed to the underside of the table and ankles braced against the legs of the stool.

"Enough," you say, and slowly sit up, shedding Daniel's touch. The kitchen feels stuffy and close. Both of you need to shower.

"How is that?" Daniel says, and wipes his hands on his pants in slow strokes, leaving an oily stain in their wake. His face is flushed, with pride perhaps, to have won you over this time. "Better?"

You roll your shoulders back, feel them crack and complain but the immediate pain is mostly alleviated, only a tolerable ache remains in your bones. You lift your hands in front of your face, turn them back and forth, flex your fingers. Crack your knuckles. You try not to sound grudging when you thank him.

Daniel smiles at you, and your skin prickles. You draw on your shirt, carefully, and your trench coat. You consider leaving it unfastened, but you wait for a moment and the impulse passes.

*

You sleep soundlessly and wake with the dawn, held prone under the phantom pressure of hands on your back.


End file.
